Kim Who? The Olympic Star that the Media Doesn’t Want to Cover

Let’s say you’re a newspaper editor or a TV news director looking for something new and bad to say about Donald Trump (and he will most assuredly give it to you) and you see an item come over the ticker that an American has just won an individual medal in her sixth consecutive Olympic games. She is only the second person ever to do this, and she’s the first woman ever to do it.

Her name is Kim Rhode, and hers is an incredible record: gold in 1996 at Atlanta, bronze in Sydney, gold in Athens, silver in Beijing, gold in London, and bronze in Rio. Big story, right? Wrong. There are problems.
Ms. Rhode, you see, competes in Olympic skeet, and skeet involves…guns. And guns are, well…

It gets worse. Ms. Rhode competes in one of the least telegenic events in the wide, wide world of sports*. Ms. Rhode is open about her support of the Second Amendment, and unlike the First Amendment, which is good, the Second Amendment is, well…

So our editor or news director will do what The New York Times did and run three short paragraphs from The Associated Press under the heading of “Olympics” and let it go at that. In fact, quite a few news organizations have picked up on Kim Rhode’s six medals in six Olympics, but it’s been a paragraph or two. Possibly, Kim Rhode got off easy. Cory Cogdell, who won bronze in trap at the 2008 and 2016 Olympics, also shot in London at the 2012 Olympics. Perhaps she didn’t medal there because she received death threats and was assigned a special security detail, and because she was the subject of a 50,000-signature petition demanding that she be thrown off the Olympic team…because she hunts.

Nor does the media ever mention Margaret Thompson, who became the first woman ever on the U.S. Olympic Shooting Team and the first woman to win an Olympic medal in shooting. At the 1976 Olympiad in Montreal, she tied with team captain Lanny Bassham for first place, but the judges gave Bassham the gold and Thompson the silver and, despite Bassham’s request, refused a shoot-off. During the playing of the National Anthem, Bassham grabbed her by the arm and hauled her up to the winner’s spot on the podium where she stood beside him. It was one of the great moments of Olympic sportsmanship, but you won’t hear about it because it happened a long time ago, and they used rifles, and as we know, guns are…well…

*According to Phil Bourjaily, to whom I am indebted for his help with this: “I remember U.S. shooter Haley Dunn’s father Larry telling me about watching her international matches on TV, for which he would have to stay up till odd hours. He said: ‘If a sport is so boring you can’t stand to watch your own daughter shoot, there’s something wrong with it.’”